The Miller Family

Hi! We are the Miller family. Rich, Melissa, Samantha, Allison, Karleigh, and Jacob. Our daughter Karleigh is 9 years old. In October of 2003, Karleigh came home from school feeling sick. We thought she had the flu. Karleigh was tired, achy, and throwing up. Karleigh was sick for two days with the flu, we thought and by Saturday morning when she was still throwing up we called her pediatrician. Her pediatrician assured us that it certainly did sound like the flu, to keep doing what we were doing. So we kept giving her Dr. Pepper to drink because that's what tasted good to her. We wanted to keep her hydrated from all of the throwing up she was doing. We thought we were doing a good thing.

By Saturday afternoon Karleigh seemed short of breath and was really throwing up all the time. I put Karleigh into the bathtub to help her get a bath and to my surprise she looked so little, she had lost weight in the three days she was sick. After she got out of the bathtub, I took her to the med center and told them what was going on and said she was short of breath. We had a short wait and she was taken back. The physician assistant that was working that late afternoon did a chest x-ray to rule some things out. When she went to look in Karleigh's throat she noticed that Karleigh's breath smelled like juicy fruit gum. She then proceeded to check Karleigh's blood sugar level. She came back and said that their meter only went up to 500 and it said Karleigh's blood sugar was registering high, which meant it was over 500. They called an ambulance and took her to DeVos Children's Hospital. By the time we got there and they checked her blood sugar it was now saying it was over 800.

The doctors said that there is a protocol they have to follow that they could not just bring her blood sugar down without consequences. So we waited and by this time she slipped into a coma, she had ketoacidosis. They said the next 24 hours would be the most critical. If she was going to be ok she would start to wake up in the next 12 hours or so. Well being the sleeper that Karleigh is she thought she would sleep a little longer making her family sweat it out some.

Karleigh's grandmother finally convinced us (her Mom and Dad) to go home and shower and come back. Well no sooner were we almost home and Miss. Karleigh decided to wake up for her grandmother. Karleigh's grandmother called her Mom on the phone and said someone wants to talk to you and there was Karleigh on the other end. We weren't even home yet and we turned around and went back to the hospital. And can you believe by the time we got there she was sleeping soundly again. I woke her up and she smiled. After everything I did to try and wake her up she wakes up for her grandmother.

We spent three days in the intensive care unit at the hospital. We went through training for how to give her injections and how to learn to deal with Karleigh's diabetes. A couple of months ago she got the insulin pump. Karleigh absolutely loves it, her favorite thing about it, is she gets to sleep in and go to sleep-overs. She has learned to become an excellent carb counter and math wiz.

Today she is a happy, healthy, active girl. She loves to swim, play with her friends, and give her sisters and brother a hard time. Our newest obstacle is Karleigh being diagnosed with IGA nephropathy which is a kidney disease. They say this isn't related to her diabetes. We take one day at a time and hope for the best. Karleigh takes all this in stride. When we're having a bad day, we just look at Karleigh and think is what we're going through really so bad?

Since, Karleigh has been diagnosed with diabetes, we have done the JDRF walk the last two years, the first year we had 8 walkers and raised $223.00 and this year we had 21 walkers and raised $556.00. Each year we hope to get more people walking with us and raise more money. This is a great cause.

We hope that one day there will be a cure so no-one has to go through what these kids with diabetes do.

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